svoyu zhizn' dlya tebya prevratit v tsvety
by Polly Little
Summary: Ivan, a closet romantic, is on a regular junk run when he finds a skyshuttle belonging to what is almost definitely the last Arthling. At the same time, Alfred wakes up after a thousand year nap just in time to realise he has a thing for muscles and antennae. Oh, and there's the tiny matter of the human race no longer existing.


_svoyu zhizn' dlya tebya prevratit v_ tsvety

Alfdlyd had once heard that a century was like a blink of an eye compared to eternity. He remembers this now as he ducks inside the cryo-pod, and the irony makes him smile (although only a little, because the thought of being frozen for years, alone and unacknowledged, sends tiny rockets freewheeling around his chest).

He has no way of knowing what will await him when he wakes, what changes he'll have to acclimatise to, what the world will look like one hundred, two hundred, _three hundred_ years later. Being a Sentinel is disjointed, isolated work, but at least it's better than staying on Earth, scrimping and saving for every scrap of food, watching his little brother get sicker and sicker while Alfred tries to scrape together enough money for him to have clothes and shoes and medicine and top surgery and everything else, choking on the smog and dying of lung cancer before he's even forty. They promised they'd look after his family, and that's more than he could hope for.

As the pneumatic seals hiss shut, Alfred keeps his eyes open and staring at the polished off-white of the clinic as long as he can before the gas forces him to close them.

))))()((((

Ivan's shuttle is the skyer equivalent of old age. It could be described as falling apart, but that would be unfair to the hours he spends with a riveter and a bottle of rubber sealant, agonisingly going over the the seams to ensure there's no way the vacuum outside can reach in for him and his precious little oxygen. Still, it's a rickety, clattering craft with a broken exhaust and tattered upholstery, and it's nowhere near pretty to look at. His sisters have been pressing him to save for another skyshuttle for a while now, but there's something comfortingly familiar about the awkward ugliness so similar to his own, even if he can taste metal whenever he hits the accelerate.

He hasn't been up for long, but the surrounding emptiness is exhausting. The sooner he can return, the better, so he aims straight for the nearest appropriate blip on the radar and ignores the way the ship groans in protest. They reach the object sooner than planned, one of the perks of being a reckless driver, and he docks even quicker, still grinning from exhilaration as he slams down the button to release the clamps.

Wiping sweat from his purple brow, Ivan grabs a respirer and heads to airlock.

Almost the second he leaves the ship, he can tell that this isn't the average RTC grab. This isn't an asteroid, it's a skyshuttle – and it's beautiful all sleek chromed lines and smooth shiny corners. Ivan falls in love instantly.

He mourns the damage his docking clamps must have done to this glorious goddess of the air, and treads slowly, guiltily, as if his hesitance can somehow make up for the ugly gashes he's scarred into the side.

Muttering an apology under his breath, Ivan pulls his laser out to cut into the gleaming metal in front of him and swing inside. It's just as shiny in here, the lights above his head that switched on with his entry gleaming with an incongruous newness against the dated style of the technology. The corridor is narrower than he's accustomed to, but he wraps his arms around himself in a one-sided hug and squeezes through the worst of it; intent on seeing as much as he can because he has no way of knowing if he'll get a chance like this again.

In some places there are markings on the walls, too deliberate to be scratches, but like no alphabet in use that he knows of. He runs one long finger along beneath them, and remembers that some of the symbols were used in the dead languages course he'd taken when he was still a hatchling.

It's odd to see an Arthling ship here. He'd thought they were all protected in museums, relics of the fragmented past before the conventions and the unions and the treaties made the universe what it is today.

This ship is a historical anomaly, far beyond the recorded limits of Arthling discovery, and the pang of guilt he feels for damaging it intensifies.

Ivan wonders if the crew of the ship were aware of how close their species was to destroying itself before they'd died. He hopes not.

Quietly, with a deliberate solemness of attitude, he murmurs the few lines he remembers from an Arthling ballad, the words tripping out from behind his mandibles clattering and awkward. " _Million, million, million alykh roz/ Iz okna, iz okna, iz okna vidish' ty/ Kto vlyublon, kto vlyublon, kto vlyublon i vser'yoz/ Svoyu zhizn' dlya tebya prevratit v tsvety."_

Then he continues to explore, unaware of the significance of the ship's sudden return to life.

))))()((((

Alfred comes back to consciousness in silence. It's dark except for the blinking green lights around the door of the pod, and he's reaching towards it before he realises that the door should have already opened automatically. He bites down the swell of panic before it can overtake him, and looks around. There's nothing but the smooth white walls of the pod, eery in the emerald glow.

But this nothing isn't quite nothing, because there's a noise outside. There's someone else out there, moving menacingly slowly in his tiny, one-person craft, and he's trapped in a cryo-pod without anything to defend himself.

Alfred's breath comes hard and fast as the footsteps come closer, and he squeezes his eyes shut tight, trying to focus on the protocol he'd memorised in the case of irregular awakening, but his textbook had been seventh-hand and near illegible and all he can think of is how many ways there are to die.

The footsteps stop, right outside the pod, and he can't bear the suspense a moment longer. Alfred looks up, and is confronted by the glassy, many-eyed stare and gaping mandibles of a being unlike he'd ever seen before.

))))()((((

Ivan's scanners hadn't shown any signs of life aboard the ship. If they had, perhaps he would have acted differently. Perhaps not. But for now, he's reached the centre of the skyshuttle, and there is a creature lurking in the shadows.

He's not ashamed to admit that he shrieks when he catches sight of it, but even as he jerks back, he notices that it hasn't reacted. Odd, especially considering how loud he had been.

He inches forward, tentatively. The figure doesn't move. It hasn't got _eyes,_ or a carapace; it looks weirdly fragile under the green glow of the lights. It has too many antennae – oddly short and soft looking, and an interesting shade of yellow besides – and not enough limbs, but for all its horror movie looks, the beast doesn't attack him when he raps on the glass with a fist (Ivan had never claimed to have any significant level of impulse control).

He leans back against the wall in relief, and that's the moment that he knocks into the button.

The creature's face moves, and slits open to reveal that it does have eyes, but Ivan's relief at that is inconsequential compared to his horror at having awakened what is almost definitely the last Arthling, an inventively violent race that pillaged a trail of destruction across their galaxy.

Ivan steps back behind the door as the monster pretends to still be asleep. What is it waiting for? Why hesitate to attack an unarmed target?

Minutes pass as Ivan's blood runs cold in fear. He daren't turn back; any sudden movement could set the beast off.

His heartbeat is a wardrum in his ear, marching him to his death.

But then the creature opens its eyes again, and the terror in them is a mirror of the terror in his own. To think of it looking at Ivan like that sets a confused sort of self-loathing itching at his heels.

He decides, with the stupid recklessness that led to him becoming a spacer in the first place, that he's going to let the Arthling out.

Hands held out to show he means no harm, Ivan approaches the door. The Arthling shies away, and he winces with guilt.

He'll have to find a way to gain it's trust, because regardless of how scared it is, it could still kill him in a matter of seconds if the stories are to be believed. He breathes against the glass, and writes a single word backwards in the condensation.

 _Privet_

The Arthling looks confused, but the fear slowly fading from its eyes is a sun set in a desert sky. One of its stubby fingers trace over the letters, and Ivan can actually see the thoughts passing across its face.

He introduces himself – name, species and gender, just like the annoying beginners' songs, and while the Arthling doesn't seem to have heard of the Shron, that lets Ivan date him to the relatively peaceful pre-Expansion era.

The Arthling says his name is Alfred, and asks Ivan to let him out. Apparently the door is broken, so Ivan uses his laser again to break the seal.

It cracks open with a pneumatic hiss, and Alfred steps carefully out. He's shorter than Ivan expects, of course, and looks… rounder. Less square.

He keeps his distance at first, but gradually relaxes, and it's all going well until Ivan reaches the part of his brief rundown on where exactly they are in the universe where he has to somehow break it to Alfred that he's probably the last Arthling alive.

Disturbingly, Alfred's face changes colour, blanching an ashen colour akin to white. The excited gleam that had developed during their brief conversation fades away.

He shakes his head. "No," he says. "No." It's more of a question than a denial; he wants Ivan to agree with him.

As if in a dream, Alfred shunts open the door of the cryo-pod and shuts himself back inside. Ivan sits down against the wall, and really himself to a long wait.

))))()((((

With carefully deliberate movements, Alfred shuts himself back inside the pod.

He closes his eyes.

He opens them.

He stares at the wall in front of him, shiny new cutting edge technology, and he hates it.

He doesn't know how to grieve a planet, grieve a species. He doesn't want to, but he can't block this out. He can't cry, either, however much he can feel the tears building, and when he looks inside himself for the sadness, there's nothing. Just a horrible empty numbness.

He closes his eyes again, and remembers everything about Earth that he loved, and now he'll never see again. He remembers Mattie, and the way he'd attempt to carry things that looked like they weighed as much as him because he wanted to help. He remembers his mother, as well as he can, the way she'd tuck her dark hair behind her ears and point up at the sky to tell him about stars when he was so small he could barely walk. He remembers the quiet smile Kiku-next-door would give him on New Year's when they watched the fireworks outside, and his awkward nod whenever Alfred offered to lend him heating credits. He remembers the taste of toast in the mornings when he wasn't quite awake yet, the chill of the wind on his way to work, the lullaby Mom had sung him and that he'd sung Mattie after she died, the purple pink of the ever present clouds at dusk, the feel of rain against his skin and the scratchiness of his favourite jacket. He remembers everything he can, and wishes there was more.

))))()((((

When Alfred comes out the pod, his eyes are rimmed with red. Ivan is concerned, but doesn't know how to point it out.

"Let's go," he says, refusing to meet his eyes.

"Where?" Ivan asks.

Alfred shrugs. "Anywhere that's not here."

They make the trip back to Ivan's home planet in silence. It's awkward for him, but it's probably worse for Alfred. Somehow, Ivan's sister Katya manages to get him the legal documents necessary to be a citizen of the Republic – thank goodness, because Ivan wouldn't know the first thing involved in going about it, and the procedure remains a lengthy blur of uncomfortable plastic chairs and strange smelling waiting rooms. They've got closer over the past year or so, and while Alfred has been opening up more, beginning to settle into his new life with surprising flexibility, and even made friends with some of the Shron in the neighborhood, Ivan would like to think that he remains Alfred's favourite person to be around.

He complains, sometimes, about feeling more like a zoo exhibit than a neighbour, but when Ivan said he was more of a museum exhibit with his old-fashioned behaviour and bizarre excitement every time a simple piece of technology functioned correctly, he'd laughed and stopped griping long enough to fight Ivan for the last resincake.

Still, Ivan catches him sometimes staring up at the sky with a look that's half wistful, half resigned. "I always thought the stars would stay the same," he says. I didn't think- but then, that's not surprising, is it?"

There isn't much that he can say in response to that.

))))()((((

Ivan is, Alfred has learnt, a bit odd even for a seven foot purple beetle with six arms and a pair of antennae. He doesn't bother polishing his ship like all the other flyboys (which he refers to as a skyshuttle despite it travelling much further than just the sky), but the second a speck of sand gets near it then he's up in arms and yelling about the effect it'll have on the plexiglass. As they live on a desert planet, this is often.

He delights in "interestingly shaped root vegetables", which he insists on showing Alfred whenever he finds, and gets teary eyed over awful sappy romance novels that use ridiculous flowery language like _forsooth, contrive_ and _albeit_ , which often climax in increasingly dramatic confessions of mutual adoration followed by the characters making out.

He also has the weirdest sense of humour. Alfred had thought that there wasn't a worse joke than _why did the chicken cross the road?_ But there is, and the joke is _what's brown and sticky? A stick._ Ivan's pure delight at this is a thing of beauty, and while it doesn't make up for losing his entire planet, it's definitely one of the best things to come out of the situation. It helps some, during the worst days, to be friends with someone so relentlessly – not cheerful, exactly, but amused by the very idea of life itself.

They share their culture with each other – even more awful jokes to start with, but Ivan creates an amazing sort of roasted deep-fried potato, and then Alfred teaches him to dab. After that, it just keeps going.

Oh, and he's Alfred's housemate. It's a good thing he was required to know Spanish and Russian and Mandarin to become a Sentinel; otherwise they'd be completely lost.

The weirdest thing, though, is that Ivan is strangely shredded from all the engineering he does on the shuttle. He's a seven foot purple beetle, yes, but there are still times when Alfred stop himself from staring at the muscles on his friend. He keeps it to himself, of course, because if Ivan finds out exactly what Alfred's dreaming about late at night with the blanket pulled over his face, then he could lose his friendship for good.

And besides, Ivan has mandibles, for goodness sake! How would kissing him even work? _Very well,_ Alfred's subconscious seems to say. _Very well indeed._

But Alfred still wakes up with a great hole in his chest where his world should be, expecting to be back in the pod, or on his flat on Earth. He's in no fit shape to ask anyone out, especially the funny, sweet, absolutely ripped alien of his dreams.

So Alfred keeps his bedroom door locked and his imagination firmly under control, and if he occasionally sneaks looks at Ivan's truly terrible romance novels to see what it is, exactly, seven foot purple beetles with six arms and a pair of antennae are into, then that's his prerogative.

))))()((((

"Tell me about Arth," Ivan says one evening.

"What do you want to know?" Alfred isn't looking at him, hands buried behind his head on top of one of the blankets he'd insisted on bringing out with them, and Ivan wonders if he's overstepped the mark.

"What was it like?"

"Arth was- _Earth_ was hot, mostly. A lot warmer than here. And damp. And it used to rain – water falling from the sky – whenever I had plans, and there was always more people on the street than expected, and the sky was this purpley grey colour in the evenings that was more like something out of an anime than real life."

It's a longer answer than Ivan was really expecting; but however much he rambles, Alfred has a tendency to shut himself up like a craeg plant when he's annoyed, so Ivan knows he doesn't mind.

"Anything else?"

Ivan shrugs.

"C'mon, there's gotta be something you've always wondered. I'm a "historical anomaly", right?"

Ivan nods.

"Go on then."

It's painfully obvious when he thinks about it. "The song. What is it actually about?"

Alfred knows the one he's referring to immediately. Ivan sings it far more than he probably should, because then it gets trapped rattling around both their heads like a bug on an escalator. The man has an obsession, and he doesn't even fully understand the language.

"It's supposed to be a love song. The guy sells his entire life to buy the woman he's in love with flowers."

"Flowers?" This isn't a word Ivan remembers from the course, and it tastes deliciously unfamiliar as it hisses out his mouth.

"Yeah, you know. Plants." Alfred kicks at the ground, and something dark flits across his face before vanishing as he continues with a flat, dead voice. "Apparently, that's how you know that they're "the one", or whatever."

"Did you ever find your "one"?" Ivan asks. Selfishly, he hopes that Alfred didn't, something ugly and possessive suddenly revealing itself inside him.

"Nope," Alfred says, popping the p sarcastically. "Guess there's not much chance anyone'll bring me flowers now, huh?"

Ivan doesn't know what to say to this. Wordlessly, he pulls his friend into a three armed hug, and they watch the stars in silence.

))))()((((

Alfred had had plans for today. He was going to cook himself a decent breakfast, take a pleasantly leisurely walk to the museum where he worked, and spend the rest of the day preparing his _**Russian and other dead Arth languages**_ course before returning home in the evening to attempt to lean more of one of the three local dialects by watching cheesy musicals with Ivan.

That had been the plan. But obviously, the very act of making a plan had destined it to go wrong, because Alfred was halfway through his breakfast when there was a knock at the door.

He opens it, mouth still half-full when he gets there. "Sup," he says, and then freezes.

Ivan is standing on his front porch, wearing what could be considered a tuxedo if one was unaware of how it was possible for colours and material to clash, and had learnt the pattern from listening to their drunken human best friend complain about how uncomfortable their cousin's wedding was.

"Wow."

"Do you like it?" Ivan looks nervous, twisting a bundle of – are those pink things leaves? Is that what he thought Alfred meant by flowers? – between three of his six hands. "I wanted to do things properly."

And then Alfred begins to understand.

"Alfred," Ivan begins, with the air of someone who has memorised a speech that they will complete even if the heavens open up and start raining down fire and ice and bullets upon them. "Since I've met you, my life has been a rollercoaster of emotions." He stumbles over the word _rollercoaster_ ; they don't have those in the Shron Republic. "You make me smile more than anyone else, and I don't know how I ever lived before you came into my life. It would make me the happiest man in the discovered universe if you would do me the honour of allowing me to return the favour, and deigned to let me take you on a date."

Alfred almost laughs, because in all his many fantasies, Ivan was never wearing neon orange, yellow and pink crêpe with a splash of gold lamé thrown in for flavour. He doesn't of course – that would be too cruel. Instead, he says, "Ivan, I think I'd like to kiss you know."

Ivan flushes magenta.

"Would that be alright?"

"Yes, that would be wonderful," Ivan manages to squeak out. And somehow, forsooth, albeit with some hiccups from Ivan's mandibles and Alfred's lingering trauma, together they contrive to make it the romance of the millennia.

 **A/n: Merry Christmas Sarah! Written for ask-navy-america as part of the RusAme Secret Santa on Tumblr. Title _(turns his whole life into roses for you)_ and lyrics from Milion Alich Roz, which became surprisingly important, and is, of course, included in the fic playlist under ****_Svoyu zhizn' dlya tebya prevratit v tsvety_** **on Spotify.**


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